Tom Robbins Quotes

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

They say a story loses something with each telling.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

I come from a family of storytellers.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

We are surrounded by story.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.